The Democratic Alliance’s (DA’s) legal challenge to the Employment Equity Amendment Act (EEAA) is a thinly veiled attempt to reverse economic transformation and thereby entrench white minority privilege.
The party’s claim that its court action is in opposition to “grand social engineering” rings hollow given the enduring legacy of apartheid’s social and economic architecture.
In truth, the DA’s stance on EEAA is an ideological inheritance, a continuation of their historical resistance to redress; part of its raison d’être to fossilise colonial and apartheid racial and gender hierarchies.
To appreciate this, let us briefly consider the Department of Employment and Labour’s 24th Commission for Employment Equity (CEE) Annual Report (2023/24). It exposes the fiction that the private sector is a transformed happy terrain which the DA seeks to shield from the supposed “interference” of the government.
The report illustrates a country still struggling to shrug off the shadow of economic apartheid. For example, while the white population group constitutes 7.7% of the nation’s economically active population (EAP), it nevertheless held 62.1% of top management level positions in 2023.
Representing 2.6% of the EAP, South Africans of Indian descent held 11.6% of these posts. At 80.7% of EAP, black Africans hold 17.2% of top management roles, while coloureds, at 9% of the EAP, account for a paltry 6.1%. These disparities are neither natural nor God ordained; they are an outcome of Verwoerdian economic violence against Africans, coloureds and Indians.
The CEE report also damningly notes that the majority of recruitment, promotion and skills-development opportunities at this highest echelon continue to flow to the white population group. This is not merit, it is the perpetuation of a boardroom order where white privilege remains the default.
Conveyor belt of privilege
The disparity reflected at top management cascades downwards to the senior management level where whites at 7.7% of EAP occupy 48.5% of positions, Indians who constitute 2.6% of EAP hold 12.4%, while black Africans hold 27.6% of positions despite being 80.7% of the population.
The lion’s share of opportunities still flows to those already at the top, which means that transformation is perpetually decked against a conveyor belt of privilege.
The private sector emerges as the stronghold of this resistance. While the government has made commendable strides, achieving 74.7% black African representation at top management, the private sector languishes with a pitiful 14% black African representation at this level, effectively maintaining the apartheid-era status quo, where 65.1% of top posts are held by white individuals.
Alongside racial disparities is gender inequality. Across all sectors, men dominate top management by more than two-and-a-half times females (roughly 73% male). While the government shows marginally better female representation at 35.4% in top leadership, the private sector registers 10% less, at 25.8%.
This glass ceiling, often a result of old boys’ clubs dressing up exclusion as “culture fit”, is an outcome of a patriarchal culture which compounds racial exclusion and puts paid to the mythology of a self-correcting market.
Nowhere is this private-sector exceptionalism and entrenched bias more grotesque than in the DA-run Western Cape, their self-proclaimed bastion of good governance.
There, white males alone occupy a staggering 57.2% of top management positions and 34.4% at senior management level. This is in a province where white people constitute only 17% of the population, compared with 42% coloured and 38% black African – who together form 80% of the residents.
This is not a reflection of a “dearth of qualified candidates”; it is a damning testament to a systemic racial and gender bias thriving under a political administration that pays lip service to equality while actively fighting the tools designed to achieve it.
Coloured and black African professionals are corralled into the lower tiers by an exclusionary “culture fit” that walks and quacks like “job reservation” in post-apartheid South Africa. These are the gatekeepers making crucial investment and employment decisions and shaping institutional cultures that too often exclude black African, coloured and Indian talent.
In its affidavit to the North Gauteng High Court, the DA wilfully misrepresents the amended Section 15A of the EEAA, which empowers the minister to set “numerical targets”, as a draconian imposition of immutable “quotas”.
Yet, the original Employment Equity Act (EEA), in Section 15(3), explicitly clarifies that affirmative action measures “include preferential treatment and numerical goals, but exclude quotas”. The Constitution itself was drafted to smash apartheid’s economic architecture, not to immortalise it, and the Employment Equity Act is one of our key demolition hammers.
Transformation failure
The current amendments provide a desperately needed impetus precisely because the “context-sensitive employer-led plans” so cherished by the DA have demonstrably failed to achieve substantive transformation, as the CEE statistics brutally confirm.
Furthermore, the Act is far from being the rigid cudgel the DA portrays. Section 15A (3) explicitly provides for nuanced, differentiated targets responsive to occupational levels, sub-sectors or regions.
Critically, Section 42(4) explicitly permits any employer to “raise any reasonable ground to justify its failure to comply”. The Act has consistently emphasised the appointment of “suitably qualified” individuals. Nothing in the Act prohibits the appointment of a candidate from a non-designated group if a diligent, exhaustive search does not find a suitably qualified candidate from a designated group.
In practice, the Act operates much like our critical-skills visa process – nuanced, consultative and always mindful of maintaining standards.
This inherent flexibility exposes the DA’s opposition as ideological warfare rather than a practical critique. Their true grievance is with the erosion of racial privilege.
Qualified franchise, swart gevaar
This position is not new for the DA. As recently as 1978, 47 years ago, the DA, then called the Progressive Party, championed a qualified franchise for black people over universal adult suffrage or “one person, one vote”.
Revealing – more than it concealed – its contempt for black people, this party, which claims liberal credentials, argued that black people needed to have attained a certain level of education and own property in order to vote. No doubt a strategy to manage the savages.
After rebranding as the Democratic Party, it opposed the Labour Relations Act of 1995 and the original Employment Equity Act of 1998 on grounds that these laws offend against “meritocracy”. You can accuse the DA as you will, but inconsistency in protecting white minority privilege cannot be one of its faults.
The DA’s dire prophecy that the Act will cripple investment or decimate employment is an old swart gevaar red herring pure and simple. After the original EEA took effect, between 2001 and 2007, South Africa’s economy grew between 4.5%-5.5%, while unemployment dropped by 11%, proving that equity policies can coexist with economic expansion.
The real drags on investment are challenges such as energy and logistics bottlenecks and crime, not the presence of black African women and men in the C-suite.
By selectively championing Section 9(1) of the Constitution (equality) while ignoring the clear mandate of Section 9(2) – the solemn duty to enact measures that advance those historically disadvantaged by unfair discrimination – the DA reveals its true colours. It aligns itself with every white-supremacist argument ever used to defy meaningful change.
This constitutional mandate demands decisive, active intervention, not passive hope or transformation on its terms – optional, non-binding and perpetually negotiable.
No Bantustan boardrooms
The EEAA, fortified by the undeniable truth of the CEE’s findings, stands as an indispensable instrument in our protracted struggle to dismantle structural racism, unlock the full spectrum of South African talent and forge an inclusive economy – a boardroom that is not a Bantustan reflecting a 7% minority.
We cannot allow the boardrooms of corporate South Africa to remain gated enclaves. The consequences for doing so would be more than symbolic.
These are the individuals who shape investment decisions, workplace cultures and corporate governance. If they do not reflect our nation, neither will our economy.
Besides, we can forget about social and political stability – something to which the DA either pays lip service or does not appreciate, or both.
The DA has no history of genuinely advancing the interests of black people in general, Africans, coloureds and Indians in particular, in our country. Its historic positions are consistent with this latest offensive and an affront to the eradication of the legacy of colonialism and apartheid.
South Africans must ask – whose freedom is advanced if the DA wins? Certainly not the coloured engineer passed over because she “won’t fit the culture”. Not the black African professional locked out of a training programme because the boardroom is “already diverse enough”.
The only winners would be those who mistake yesterday’s privilege for today’s right.
The Constitution demands better. South Africa deserves better. DM